Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Nostradamus: A New Look at an Old Seer

As these examples show, one cannot claim that Nostradamus successfully predicted the future.

Nostradamus,
history’s most famous prophesier, continues to fascinate. Claims
that he foresaw the rise of Napoleon and of Hitler, among other world
events, are being supplemented by assertions that he divined the terrorist
strikes of September 11, 2001, and the end-times brouhaha over 2012.

I
have taken a fresh look at several of his more famous quatrains, translating
them from sixteenth-century French into rhymed English verses—no easy
task!

Background

Mìchele
de Notre-Dame (1503–1566), better known by the Latinized Nostradamus, was a French physician and astrologer
who has been variously described as a scholar, a sorcerer, and a fraud.
He became wealthy and honored, especially at the French court where
Henry II’s queen, Catherine de Medìci (1519–1589), was a patron
of astrologers and sorcerers.

Nostradamus’s
major work was a collection of quatrains (four-line rhyming verses)
numbering one thousand and arranged in groups of a hundred called centuries.
The first 353 quatrains were published in 1555 as Les
Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus,
and they were followed by other volumes. The verses’ vague, symbolic
language meant that they could be interpreted in different ways in different
times, and—by a process known as retrofitting (after-the-fact matching)—an
event could in hindsight look as if it had been predicted by the supposed
seer.

It
is sometimes said that Nostradamus wrote in “Old French”
(Stray 2009, 264), but that term is reserved for the French language
of the ninth to fourteenth centuries. Nostradamus actually wrote in
Middle French, which was used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
(Modern French has been used from the seventeenth century to the present.
See Encyclopedia
Britannica 1960, s.v.
“French Language.”) Nostradamus’s quatrain lines have ten
syllables each and a mid-line pause, or caesura, for rhetorical effect. The lines
rhyme ABAB. The constraints of this poetic form caused him to engage
in various verbal strategies, such as using compressed language, even
abbreviations.

Translating
Nostradamus is difficult at best, and one who would translate into verse
must—like the original versifier—make things fit. I have tried to
follow Nostradamus’s word choice when possible, but out of necessity
I have occasionally used synonyms, altered the syntax, and made other
modifications—including sometimes settling for near rhyme rather than
full rhyme.

The Quatrains

Here are
ten of Nostradamus’s most significant quatrains first given in the
original Middle French and then recast into modern English verse and
discussed.

1. The
Death of King Henry II.
One of Nostradamus’s most famous prophecies—number I:35—is also
“the verse that made his reputation” (LeVert 1979, 67):

Le lyon ieune
le vieux surmontera,

En champ bellique
par singulier duelle,

Dans caige d’or
les yeux luy creuera:

Deux classes
vne, puis mourir, mort cruelle.

My translation:

The young lion shall
overcome the old,

On field of battle by
single duel;

He’ll smash his eyes
with a casing of gold:

Two fleets one, then
to die, a death cruel.

Published
in 1555, this verse is said to predict the accidental death of King
Henry II, the quatrain’s “old lion.” Reportedly, during
a French jousting tournament in 1559, a splinter of a broken lance went
through the visor of the King’s golden helmet (Nostradamus’s “cage
of gold”) and thence through his eye into his brain. He subsequently
suffered and died “a cruel death” (Roberts 1949, 20).

Alas,
the quatrain was clearly not intended to refer to Henry. Just three
years after publishing it, in mid-1558, Nostradamus penned a letter
to the king, saying that he expected him to live a long life and predicting
wonderful things in his future. Moreover, a tournament is not a “field
of battle”; the verse refers to “eyes,” plural; and there is no
known precedent for a golden helmet (gold is a soft metal), certainly
not in the case of Henry (Randi 1993, 175). So Nostradamians are simply
retrofitting, attempting to adapt later events to the French seer’s
murky statements. The same is true of the word classes—interpreted by some Nostradamians
as “wounds” (from Greek klasis).1 (It may mean “classes” or
“knells” or—if the word is really the Latin classis—“fleets.”) The sense of the
verse is that an old leader is slain by a younger one, thus unifying
their forces.

2. The
Coming of Napoleon. A rather typical Nostradamus quatrain,
number I:60, illustrates how very different interpretations can be drawn
from a single cryptic verse. Nostradamus (1555) wrote:

Vn Empereur naistra
pres d’Italie,

Qui a l’Empire
sera vendu bien cher,

Diront auecques
quels gens il se ralie

Qu’on trouuera
moins prince que boucher.

I translate
the rather plain text of quatrain I:60 as follows:

A ruler
will be born near Italy,

Whose
cost to the Empire shall be quite dear;

They
will say from those whom he shall rally

That
he is less a prince than a butcher.

The
phrase “near Italy” covers a lot of ground, from Austria and
Corsica to France and Switzerland, and Greece and Yugoslavia. The verse
is usually held to refer to Napoleon (1769–1821), but other candidates
include the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1578–1637) and even Adolph
Hitler (1889–1945). (See LeVert 1979, 80; Randi 1982, 34.)

(Another
quatrain [VIII:1] that is also said to refer to Napoleon begins with
the three words Pau,
Nay, Oloron, which are
interpreted [Robb 1961, 43–44] as an imperfect anagram [“Nay-pau-lon-Roy”]
of Napoleon Roi [“King”]. However, Napoleon
was not a king, and the words are simply the names of three proximate
French towns [Randi 1982, 207–212].)

3. The
Rise of Adolph Hitler. Another quatrain, II:24, is said
to refer to Adolph Hitler most specifically. Nostradamus (1555) wrote:

Bestes farouches
de faim fluues tranner:

Plus part du
camp encontre Hister sera,

En caige de fer
le grand fera treisner,

Quand Rin enfant
Germain obseruera.

I translate
the quatrain provisionally as:

They’ll swim the rivers,
fiercely famished brutes:

Most of the army shall
range the Ister;

In an iron cage will
be drawn The Great

When Rhine’s child
shall Germany watch over.

Hister is said to denote “Hitler,”
and in the late 1930s Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, whose
wife was “an avid Nostradamian,” exploited this and other quatrains
that supposedly prophesied France’s fall after a German invasion (Hogue
2003, 313).

Hister, or rather Ister, is actually an
old name for the lower Danube River. The last line of the quatrain is
rather confusing, and translators have given many different renderings.
Some later texts replaced Rin with Rine (“the Rhine”) or rien
(“nothing”). And Germain can mean “Germany” or another
word of the exact same spelling, i.e., “brother” or “cousin.”
And so the verse could read, “When a child [of the] Rhine shall keep
watch over his brother” (LeVert 1979, 111), or “When the German
child watches the Rhine” (Robb 1961, 47), or “When the German
child will observe nothing” (Leoni 1982, 169), or other possibilities.
However, because Hister, Rin, and Germain are all capitalized (Nostradamus
1555), thus consistent with proper names, and also because Nostradamus
[III:58] uses Rin for “Rhine” elsewhere, I translate
the words as “Ister,” “Rhine,” and “Germany.” LeVert (1979,
111) observes that, to Nostradamus’s contemporaries, the “Child
of the Rhine” would indicate Charles V (1500–1558).

4.
The Great London Fire.
This obscure verse—quatrain II:51—has received increasing attention,
some believing that it forecast the Great Fire of London in 1666. Nostradamus
(1555) wrote:

Le sang du iuste
à Londres fera faute

Bruslés par
fouldres de vint trois les six.

La dame antique
cherra de place haute:

De mesme secte
plusieurs seront occis.

I translate
the quatrain thusly:

Blood of the just in
London shall be scarce,

With twenty three seized,
by thunderbolts burned.

The senile lady shall
fall from high place:

Of the same sect many
more will be slain.

Nostradamus’s
verse does specifically mention London and people burned. The falling
of the “old lady” (La
dame antique) is said
to be “the subsequent falling of the statue of the Virgin from St.
Paul’s steeple” (Roberts 1949, 6), though there appears to have
been no such statue (Randi 1993, 191). The phrase that translates as
“twenty three the six” (or “sixes”)—three times twenty plus
six—could suggest the year ’66.

However,
line two is missing a syllable and may be corrupt. Printers of the era
sometimes set type as someone read the text aloud (Gaskell 1972, 49,
112–13), so what sounded like Bruslés
par fouldres de vint trois les six
might actually have read, Bruslés
par fouldres plus de vint trois saisis
(“Burned by lightnings, more than twenty-three seized”). In any
case, Nostradamian skeptics propose a reasonable explanation of this
verse—that it is a contemporaneous reference to Queen Mary Tudor of
England (“Bloody Mary” [1516–1558]) and her persecution of Protestants,
many of whom were burned at the stake. Her atrocities resulted in her
downfall. The word antique in the third line usually means
“ancient” but can also mean “eccentric” or “senile.” Mary
was considered deranged and at her death was incoherent and apparently
insane (LeVert 1979, 123–24; Randi 1993, 191–92).

5.
A Mysterious Forecast.
Among Nostradamus’s cryptic verses is quatrain III:58, which while
historically murky is in another sense quite illuminating. The seer
wrote (Nostradamus 1555):

Aupres du Rin
des montaignes Noriques

Naistra vn grand
de gents trop tard venu,

Qui defendra
SAVROME & Pannoniques,

Qu’on ne saura
qu’il sera deuenu.

I translate
the quatrain this way:

Close by the Rhine from
the Noric mountains,

A great one’s born
of people come too late.

He’ll defend Saurome
and Pannonians;

It shall not be learned
what has been his fate.

Nostradamus
predicts the birth of a “great one” whose people are late arrivers
to a region “near the Rhine from the Noric mountains” (the
Noric Alps). This leader will defend “Saurome” (as it should
be spelled, a Slavic area, now Lithuania) and the “Pannonians”
(apparently Hungarians), though his end will be unknown (LeVert 1979;
Roberts 1949, 96; Leoni 1982, 611; Hogue 1997, 265–66). Nostradamians
are puzzled by the quatrain, although Leoni (1982, 611) suggests an
interpretation such that “the prophecy was fulfilled in reverse”
and notes that some others have applied the quatrain to Hitler. Less
torturously, Roberts (1949, 96) holds that “it obviously refers to
an event and character in his time now lost in the maze of history.”

None
of the Nostradamians seems willing to accept the more obvious explanation
that Nostradamus was a failed seer. When he says of the “great one”
that “it will not be learned what will become of him,” the
prognosticator tacitly admits that he, too, is unable to see what the
future holds!

6. Failed
Prophecy of Persia.
Here is one of Nostradamus’s predictions, in quatrain III:77, that
gives a specific date of occurrence (Nostradamus 1555):

Le tiers climat
soubz Aries comprins

Lan mil sept
cens vingt & sept en Octobre,

Le roy de Perse
par ceux d’Egypte prins:

Conflict, mort,
pte: à la croix grãd opprobe.

I translate
quatrain III:77 as follows:

The third climate, under
Aries’ listing,

October, seventeen twenty-seven,

Those of Egypt capture
the Persian King.

Conflict, death, loss:
the Cross disgraced even.

The
second line of Nostradamus’s astrological forecast is usually understood
to give the date as “1727 in October” (Leoni 1982, 213; Robb
1961, 59). However, LeVert (1979, 181), calling attention to the caesura
(the mid-line pause common to quatrains), observes that it could be
read “one thousand seven hundred [pause] twenty and seven in October,”
i.e., October 27, 1700, but this seems overreaching.2

Whatever
date in the eighteenth century is chosen, the prophecy is clearly a
failed one. Some Nostradamians attempt to interpret the verse’s
“those of Egypt” as Turks who conquered Egypt in 1517, but
as Leoni (1982, 614–15) observes, the Turks “did not, by any stretch
of the imagination, capture (or even defeat) the Persian ruler.” Neither
was any particular shame brought to Christendom. “And if ‘Egypt’
is taken literally, there has been no war between Egypt and Persia since
1555 (or in fact since the 6th century bc), though there may well be
one in the future.” Leoni concludes that Nostradamus’s prophecy
is therefore “a well-dated failure” (Leoni 1982, 615).3

(Neither
is this quatrain the only one with a dated prediction that has failed.
Quatrain X:72 forecast, for the seventh month of the year 1999, the
coming “from the sky” of a “great King of Terror”
from a place called Angoulmois [Nostradamus 1555]. Whether
the word is interpreted as the French district Angoumois or as an anagram for Mongolois
[Mongols—see Leoni 1982, 434–35, 750], the specified events did
not occur.)

7. The
Invention and Flight of the Montgolfier Balloon.
In quatrain V:57, Nostradamus (1557) wrote:

Istra du mont
Gaulfier & Auentine,

Qui par le trou
aduertira l’armée:

Entre deux rocz
sera prins le butin,

De Sext. mansol
faillir la renommee.

I offer
the following translation:

Going from Mount Gaussier
and Aventine,

Through the hole one
notifies the army;

Two rocks the booty
is taken between,

For Sext. Mausol. to
lose celebrity.

Some
Nostradamians (e.g., Ionescu 1987) have interpreted the quatrain as
predicting the invention of the Montgolfier balloon, the hot-air craft
used for the first successful human flight in 1783. Stuart Robb (1961,
143) views it as “one of the most amazing prophecies of the French
seer.” Supposedly, the quatrain specifically cites Montgaulfier [sic];
the word trou or “hole” refers to the balloon’s
opening; and so on. Unfortunately, Gaulfier is an obvious printer’s error,
a common misreading of the Middle-French long s (it resembles f), coupled with an early version
of the name of a hill near Saint-Remy (Gaulsier), actually spelled Gaussier.

There,
at the foot of Mount Gaussier, is a celebrated once-supposed “mausoleum”
(actually only a monument) of Sextus. (Hence, Nostradamus’s “Sext.
mansol” is obviously a reference with another printer’s error:
an inverted u having become an n.) Nearby are the deux
rocz (“two rocks”)
and le trou (“hole”) through the mountain
that Nostradamus surely refers to (see Leoni 1982, 266, 649; Randi
1993, 184). Therefore, the quatrain does not represent a prophecy of
balloon flight but is instead a murky reference to some obscure incident—real
or imagined—from the boyhood of Nostradamus, who was born at Saint-Remy
(see also Roberts 1949, 164). Basically, the quatrain states how, once
in the region, passage through “the hole” was effected to alert
an army and a certain butin (plunder) taken between two rocks,
causing the Sext[us] Mausol[eum] to lose its renown.

8–9.
The Terrorist Strike on New York City.
Some say the following quatrains—VI:97 and X:49 (text from 1557 and
1568 editions, respectively)—predict the attack of September 11, 2001:

Cinq & quarante
degrés ciel bruslera,

Feu approucher
de la grand cité neusue,4

Instant grand
flamme esparse saultera,

Quãt on voudra
des normãs faire preuue.

Iardin du monde
aupres de cité neufue,

Dans le chemin
de montaignes cauees

Sera saisi &
plonge dans la Cuue,

Beuuant par force
eaux soulfre enuenimees.

Here are
my translations of the two quatrains:

At forty-five degrees
shall burn the sky,

Fire to approach the
new grand city thence;

Instantly great scattered
flames will arise,

When one shall seek
the Normans’ evidence.

Garden of the world
near the new city,

In the pathway of cavernous
mountains,

Seized and plunged into
a cauldron shall be,

Forced to drink water
that’s sulfur-poisoned.

Following
the September 11 terrorist strike on New York City, a fake prophecy
attributed to Nostradamus told of an attack on the “City of York.”
The real Nostradamian prophecies refer only to “the new city”
and “the new grand city.” One verse’s “hollow mountains”
are interpreted as skyscrapers, and there is no doubt—with references
to flames and waters poisoned by sulfur—that Nostradamus is forecasting
calamity (Hogue 2003, xii–xiv).

However, before
the terrorist attacks Nostradamians were offering non-terrorist explanations.
Roberts (1949, 96) interpreted the first quatrain as saying, “A cataclysmic
fire shall engulf the greatest and newest of the world’s big cities.”
Of the second, he said (1949, 328): “This startling prophecy of a
catastrophic event at a pleasure resort not far from the great new city,
predicts a tremendous tidal wave of poisoned waters that shall sweep
in from the resort and overwhelm the man-made mountain-like skyscrapers
of the city.” Neither of these scenarios is compatible with a terrorist
attack on New York, whether by nuclear means or not (Hogue 2003, xiii).
Indeed, Nostradamus would seem to be speaking of Europe, at least in
the first verse with its reference to “the Normans.” (In any case,
New York City is not at forty-five degrees latitude but instead well
under forty-one.)

10. The
‘2012’ Predictions.
Several of Nostradamus’s quatrains supposedly anticipate the year
2012, the last year on the Mayan calendar (Hogue 1997). Twenty-twelvers
believe that something portentous will occur then—if not the end of
the world, perhaps some New Awakening of Consciousness and blah, blah,
blah. Quatrain II:62 has been mentioned in this regard (Nostradamus
1555; see Andrews and Andrews 2008, 265):

Mabus puis tost
alors mourra, viendra

De gens &
bestes vne horrible defaite:

Puis tout à
coup la vengence on verra

Cent, main, soif,
faim, quãd courra la comete.

Here is
how I translate quatrain II:62:

Mabus then afterwards
will die; comes next

A horrible defeat of
men and beasts:

All at once vengeance
will be seen to vex.

A comet’s pass—bloody
hand, hunger, thirst.

The
word mabus is unidentified, but some Nostradamians
believe it refers to Saddam Hussein, noting (incorrectly) that mabus
spells sadam when held before a mirror. (In
fact it reads sudam—with the s and a backward [see Andrews and Andrews
2008].) A more likely possibility is that the handwritten word was misread
by the typesetter’s reader, that it was actually malus, meaning “the evil one.” Also,
the first word of the last line, cent (“one hundred”), is more likely
the similar-sounding sang (“blood”) (see LeVert 1979,
129).

Nostradamus
predicted many calamities—often heralded by a comet, according to
a superstition of his time. However, he did not make a doomsday prophecy,
merely stating in a later preface that his forecasts “extend from
now to the year 3797” (qtd. in Leoni 1982, 127). Nevertheless, Twenty-twelvers
seem to be “desperately trying to find a way of decoding a 2012 prediction
from Nostradamus’ quatrains” (Stray 2009, 268).

*
* * *

As these
examples show, one cannot claim that Nostradamus successfully predicted
the future. In his book The
Occult Conceit, Owen
Rachleff (1971, 138) characterized Nostradamus’s prophecies as
“exquisite examples of ambiguity, aided by a keen sense of history.”
However, James Randi (1993, 223) did see the future regarding Nostradamus,
predicting many years ago that his legend would survive:

An ever-abundant
number of interpreters will pop up to renew the shabby exterior of his
image, and that gloss will serve to entice more unwary fans into acceptance
of the false predictions that have enthralled millions in the centuries
since his death. Shameless rationalizations will be made, ugly facts
will be ignored and common sense will continue to be submerged in enthusiasm.

Amazing! Every word has
come true! Notes

1.
Since 1568, the original text’s Deux
classes vne has been
rewritten as Deux
plaies une (“Two wounds,
one”) so that it would better fit King Henry’s death in 1559. Actually,
Nostradamus’s classes means “fleets” everywhere else
in the quatrains (Leoni 1982, 576).

2.
Roberts (1949, 102) attempts to convert the date to 2025 using a “special
chronology” he divines from Nostradamus.

3.
See Robb (1961, 59–61) for a contrary view.

4.
Here is another s/f mistake: cité
neusue should be cité neufue
as in the other of the pair of quatrains (X:49)—in modern French, cité neufve.

References

Andrews,
Synthia, and Colin Andrews. 2008. The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to 2012: An Ancient Look at a Critical Time. New York: Alpha Books.

Bleiler,
E.F. See LeVert 1979.

The
Classic French Dictionary.
1944. Chicago: Follett Publishing Co.

Gaskell,
Philip. 1972. A
New Introduction to Bibliography.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

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